Free Republic

A Louisiana federal judge on Wednesday permanently blocked the federal government from enforcing its mask and vaccine mandates for children and teachers in public preschool. The Head Start program, which provides early education to infants, toddlers, and kids preparing for kindergarten, cannot require that any adults or students in the applicable centers or daycare be vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear masks, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ruled. The regulation applied to children as young as two years old, Doughty noted, both indoors and outdoors during activities that involve close contact with other people. The court rejected the argument...

The mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on the federal Head Start program was struck down on Sept. 21 by a U.S. judge who said the mandate is clearly outside the power of the agency that promulgated and enforced it. “The Court finds the Agency Defendants have exceeded their authority by implementing the Head Start Mandate because Congress only gave Agency Defendants the power to ‘modify’ Head Start performance standards. The Head Start Mandate is not a modification,” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said in a 27-page ruling. Federal law says the government can impose standards on...

A federal program called Head Start that serves hundreds of thousands of young children will soon stop requiring masks. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, which runs the program, announced on Sept. 16 that it is planning to publish a rule that will rescind its mask mandate. “This will align Head Start program masking requirements more closely with the updated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance,” the administration said in an announcement. The change will happen “in the near future,” according to the administration. Officials have declined to give an exact...

The Biden administration mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates for the Head Start program have been blocked in additional 24 states by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee, granted a preliminary injunction on Jan. 1 to Georgia and 23 other states against the mandates. Doughty said he thinks the government lacks the authority to impose the mask mandate on all children two years and older and the vaccine requirements on all workers and many volunteers and contractors. The law in question does not mention masks or vaccines, leaving the administration reliant on the health secretary’s ability...

Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution wondered why "children who participated in Tennessee's statewide pre-K program had worse attitudes toward school and poorer work habits than children who didn't." Haskins co-authored a policy brief (entitled "Trouble in the Land of Early Childhood Education?") with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Columbia University, and they noted, "the past year has seen a disagreement erupt on the playground" regarding the future of pre-K early education. They admitted, "One of the most important aspects of early education is its popularity with the public." They continued, "Public support is vital if we aim to expand...

The former executive director of a former Head Start program in Jersey City Tuesday admitted that he diverted more than $250,000 from programs for underprivileged children and used the money for personal expenses, including a Maserati and a mink coat, prosecutors said. Robert E. Mays, 38, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton in federal court to one count of wire fraud. According to court papers charging him, Mays in 2013 forged records and duped employees at the Jersey City Child Development Centers into believing that its board of directors had raised his salary 61 percent to $155,000...

Scientists have long agreed that we humans are a complex combination of our inherited traits and the environments in which we are raised. How the scales tip in one direction or the other, however, is still the subject of much debate. To better understand the nature versus nurture question, UC Santa Barbara psychologist John Protzko analyzed an existing study to determine whether and how environmental interventions impacted the intelligence levels of low birth weight children. The key finding: Interventions did raise intelligence levels, but not permanently. When the interventions ended, their effects diminished over time in what psychologists describe as...

Since the major escalation in Arab terrorist attacks in Israel began at the start of October last year, Israelis have consistently complained about the use of social media to incite terrorism and glorify "martyrdom," and the lack of enforcement by social media companies. [...] Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is Facebook, which now faces legal action over its slow, minimal reaction to the reams of anti-Semitic incitement uploaded daily. Now, the Israeli rights NGO which is leading the legal campaign against Facebook incitement is taking the fight directly to the digital giant's CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Shurat...

Jenean Hampton, the running mate of Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin, said the federal early childhood education program known as Head Start is used to indoctrinate young children. Head Start is a federal program providing 3 to 5 year old children from low income families with health and developmental screenings, meals and education services. On the campaign trail in Jessamine County on Tuesday, Hampton told a group at a meet-and-greet in Nicholasville that the program essentially does not serve a purpose. “I remember when Head Start began and it was just for low income, very low income kids because they...

A little girl, catching a cool breeze from an air conditioning unit in the yard, was blindsided by another child about her same age, who had evidently had some practice with fighting fierce. The small victim wasn’t alone, as there were plenty of nearby witnesses, who could have protected her but didn’t because they were too busy recording the brutal beat down and encouraging it. The video was sent to Mediatakeout, allegedly by a “concerned” relative of the 5-year-old girl on the receiving end of the attack. It’s not known whether this relative bothered to send the footage to authorities, but thankfully,...

Try as they might, when proponents of early federally funded pre-school education ala Head Start try to make the case for their cause, they can’t quite seal the deal. “There is one study that shows that the benefits of pre-K education will wash out after four years,” Governor Terry McAuliffe, D-VA, claimed at the Center for American Progress (CAP) on Friday, April 10, 2015. He then said, “I’ve talked to kindergarten teachers who say it makes a difference.” But kindergarten would fall within that four-year window and he offered no examples of studies that show differing conclusions. Maybe this is...

Are Americans really longing for “Head Start-like programs” for their children? So argues Eleanor Clift in a recent article for the Daily Beast. Clift praises El Centro Rosemount, a preschool center in Washington, D.C., that serves children from affluent families and students in the federal Head Start program.As the day care center notes, it’s one of the few such centers in the country that cares for students in Head Start along with students from tuition-paying households. Visiting the center and observing the students led Clift to the conclusion that Rosemount “epitomizes the value of early schooling.”Rosemount, however, might be the...

"We will restore science to its rightful place ... " So intoned a "dismissive and derisive" President Barack Obama in his first inaugural. It's been oft quoted in the five years since (frequently by me, I'll confess) for its arrogance and condescension, which has continuing relevance, but before turning to the left's latest departure from scientific rigor, I cannot resist a fuller quotation. The second part of this sentence from Obama's first inaugural reads " ... and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost." Hmm. In his second inaugural (compared to Abraham Lincoln's second by...

When the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, it forced the closing of Head Start facilities in several states, stopping educational services for thousands of low-income kids. So heart-rending was this spectacle that a pair of Texas philanthropists gave $10 million to keep the programs going. Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas appeared at a rally of parents protesting the Head Start closures, holding up a child's chair and declaring, "Here is the empty chair of the next astronaut. Here is the empty chair of a captain in the United States military." House Republicans were not about to be...

<p>Lawmakers from both parties in Washington spent their Friday exchanging blame for the government shutdown, even as they were heading home for the weekend with no new negotiations scheduled.</p> <p>Sen. Marco Rubio, (R ) Florida, took to the senate floor to blast the president for his personal exchanges with House Speaker John Boehner.</p>

President Obama recently spoke at a Binghamton University Presidential Town Hall meeting. “We don’t have an urgent deficit crisis. The only crisis we have is one that’s manufactured in Washington, and it’s ideological. And the basic notion is, is that we shouldn’t be helping people get health care and we shouldn’t be helping kids who can’t help themselves and whose parents are underresourced, we shouldn’t be helping them get a leg up. And so some of the Headstart, even deeper cuts in education support, even deeper cuts in basic science and research. And, you know, that’s like eating your corn...

We have a president who loves to give campaign speeches to adoring crowds, but who doesn't seem to have much interest in governing. That was apparent Wednesday, when Barack Obama delivered the first of several promised "pivot to the economy" speeches at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he spoke eight years ago as a newly elected U.S. senator. The hour-long speech started off with some characteristic self-referencing -- he didn't have gray hair then, he noted, or a motorcade -- and ended with a quotation from Galesburg native Carl Sandburg. But in between there was not much in the...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday that “cultural hesitation” makes it more difficult for some Hispanic parents to want to enroll their children in public pre-school programs because of their preference for family and friends. Duncan’s remarks came when asked about pre-school and the Hispanic community at an event to mark the anniversary of Educare of Washington, D.C., a preschool for children from six weeks to five years old. …

Head Start teachers and administrators told The Daily Caller that their most pressing concern is not budget impacts from sequestration but changes coming from President Barack Obama’s health-care law. In 2014, the impact of 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “is probably going to be a 9 percent [cost] increase, and significantly more the next year,” said Nancy Nordyk, director of the Head Start program in southern Oregon. Rising healthcare costs will likely force Oregon to reduce some Head Start workers’ hours so they’re not eligible for the medical program, said Nordyk, who spoke to TheDC during a national...

That’s the simple reality of Friday’s vote to ease the pain for the Federal Aviation Administration. By assenting to it, Democrats have agreed to sequestration for the foreseeable future. In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that...